Embodiments relate to communications in general and, in particular, to packet scheduling in satellite communications using self-clocked fair queuing.
There are many different types of queuing techniques in packet scheduler design. Priority schedulers may assign a queue N with a higher priority than another queue N−1. Weighted schedulers may assign a weight to each queue such that each queue may be guaranteed a fraction of a total link in proportion to its weight. Weighted schedulers may include methods such as weighted fair queuing (WFQ), deficit weighted round-robin (DWRR), and self-clocked fair queuing (SCFQ), for example. WFQ schedulers are very popular in the routing world. For example, different traffic classes may be guaranteed a fraction of a link capacity. WFQ schedulers may typically be implemented where the link rate may be fixed.
Systems such as DVB-S2 and satellite systems in general, however, may have variable link rates. Furthermore, WFQ schedulers may cause delay for some time sensitive packets, such as voice packets. Guaranteeing a fixed fraction of bandwidth may, standing alone, not provide sufficient performance for certain traffic classes (e.g., voice, video) in certain instances. Therefore, it may be desirable to identify novel techniques for scheduling packets in an efficient manner to provide an absolute rate guarantee (in Mbps, for example) to certain classes of traffic, while sharing the excess in weighted proportion.